Chapter Text
The first night Beau saw it she was 15. She had gotten into a lot of trouble for sneaking out, and was too sore to sleep. She laid awake, tossing and turning. Finally she gave up and got out of bed. It was the middle of the night. She turned on the light, opened up a book, and saw a small blue circle on her wrist.
Hmm. She rubbed gently at it. It didn’t smear or fade. She tried a little harder. Nothing. After a few moments of staring at it and examining it, she gave up and went back to sleep. When she woke up in the morning it was gone. She checked her wrist nearly every minute for the next week and there was no sign of it.
She knew better than to bring it up with her family, and after it never reappeared, she eventually forgot about it.
About a month later, when she got up before dawn to help with chores, there it was, in the same place. This time she knew it wasn’t her imagination or some trick of the light. She began to do some research on what the heck was going on with her skin. She knew it didn’t hurt or itch, and it was perfectly circular. After a few days of reading tombs of medical conditions, magical effects, and the like in her father’s library, she ran across the myth of soulmate markings. There were extremely rare and largely assumed to be a myth. I mean she didn’t really know much about magic or the gods, but she’d never heard of this before or seen anyone with it. A lot of the books in her dad’s library were fiction or folktales. Ramblings of madmen for a madman. She was sure that they weren’t real, but she had no better explanation for the time being.
Confused and honestly a little bit freaked out about what these strange markings were, she tried to forget about it. She never saw them during the day, so it was easy to keep it out of sight out of mind. She even began wearing cloth wrappings on her wrist most of the time, just in case someone saw it. But no one, not even her, ever did.
Another month or so later, she was out for a night walk (definitely against her parent’s rules) when she tripped and twisted her ankle. Moaning in pain and stranded out in the wilderness a few miles from home, she bent down to try and inspect her injury. There, on her ankle, was a circular blue mark, identical to the one she had seen on her wrist. She quickly forgot about her pain, and limped home in the moonlight.
After she discovered they were appearing on different parts of her body she decided to set up a full experiment. The curiosity was now much stronger than her desire for this all to just go away. If these marks were on her body, she wanted to understand what they were, where they were, and why they were. She started a journal recording every time she saw them. She woke up every hour to inspect her entire body during the night.
They appeared most nights in various places, her wrist, her inner thigh, her ankle, the side of her rib cage, all the most private, intimate places on her body. At first it infuriated her. She wasn’t sleeping well and she felt exposed. Whatever these marks were, whether they were linked to someone else or not, it felt like a violation of her privacy. If she didn’t control the color of her own body, what could she control. She grew to resent whatever or whoever may be connected to her markings.
After Beau determined the pattern to the markings, her feelings started to shift. Even though she couldn’t figure out the meaning behind them or what the pattern meant, there was definitely a repeating cycle. It no longer felt quite as violating. Beau stopped recording them and fixating on them. Instead of an unexpected intrusion, they began to feel reliable. It was consistent, grounding. It became a regular part of her life, a secret that she kept to herself, and when she was in a particularly bad place, a hope that maybe there was someone out there looking out for her.
When Beau started to see Tori regularly, she knew it would come up eventually. She tried to push that off as long as possible. The markings felt like an extremely intimate part of her that no one had ever seen before. Nor was anyone really supposed to. Now that she knew the pattern, it was easy to cover them. Wrist wrappings, socks, and some nights were she just had to keep her shirt on (god forbid).
“Hey Beau, what’s this?” Tori said one night. They were laying in bed together, with Beau’s head on Tori’s chest. Tori had stopped stroking her hair, and had pulled it all back away from her face.
“What are you talking about?”
“You have a little blue circle behind your ear,” Tori said as she went to touch it.
Beau immediately jumped up and ran into the bathroom. She shut the door and locked it. First, she tried to see it in the mirror. She could see most of it, but some of it disappeared into her hairline.
“Beau, are you okay?” Tori said from the other side of the door. The handle jiggled.
“I’m fine. Just leave me alone.” Beau yelled back. She took her dagger and started to shave away the hair behind her ear to expose the whole circle. With wide eyes, she started rushing out of the bathroom and the inn room.
“Beau, wait! What’s going on?” Tori said as she followed her out. “What did you do to your hair.”
“I’m sorry Tori, I just really need to go back home for something. I can’t tell you. I’ll come find you tomorrow and we can talk about it.”
Beau ran back to her parents' place and grabbed her old mark journal. The placement and timing of the circle behind her ear completed the pattern. There was one every night, with no gaps in time. She could now map the placement of the circles for every day of the cycle. Her and Tori never had that conversation, and she never let her hair grow back out.